I recently bought a new desktop machine that came with Xandros Standard Edition 3.0 preinstalled. However, after trying Feather Linux and Puppy on my older machine, this new machine (presumably much faster) seems to bog down running Xandros with version 3.0. So I will likely be back to Puppy and soon.

I do have a couple of questions, though. My new machine has a SmartLink modem installed. I have Puppy 1.0.3 and wondered whether it would be able to recognize that modem or if I would be better off waiting for 1.0.4 to be released.

Also, I would like to be able to play DVD movies I already own (I don't want to make copies or upload them to the Web or anything like that - why should someone else get free what I paid for? ), something I have not been able to get working in Xandros. Has anyone had success doing this in Puppy? If so, what would I need to do to make it work? Thanks in advance. You guys are the best. _________________Walt

Yes, gxine works fine on genuine Hollywood silver screen masterpieces.... Probably not great on really old computers. Little notchy playing on my 366mhz with 256mb ram. The Ogle dvd player that early versions of Puppy had plays dvd smoother on more limited computers.

Edit: I had played around trying to copy early Puppy version of Ogle (and its varied dependencies) to my present 1.0.1 version. Hadnt remembered getting it to work, but just tried it with "Smilla's Sense of Snow". Started Ogle, then hit the "start disk" under "file". Screen popped up and Smilla started playing. Does play movies much better on my old computer than gxine. No slowness/nochiness. Now I may try adding the Goggles gui front end for Ogle. Its suppose to be quite nice.

I couldn't get it to work. I have a DVD-RW machine and am wondering if that makes a difference. I also noticed that while in Xandros, xine points to /dev/dvd and the Warning message plays before xine stops with an error message, the KDE Control Center points to /dev/cdroms/hdc when I click on CDROM under Hardware Detection. (There is no corresponding listing for DVD in the Contro Center.) I tried it both with and without SCSI-emulation set up.

CDs play fine, but I'd like to watch my Region 1 DVDs, if possible. Arrggh

Now since I don't know how to do this someone else will
so here is something I found:
cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/
www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/
there is instructions on the first one but not enough for me I think???_________________Heaven is on the way, until then let's get the truth out!

You want SCSI-emulation off. Insert your movie, click on gxine, click file, click dvd. It should start playing. I suspect the reason you cant play movie dvd under Xandros is due to it maybe not having necessary codecs installed. But dont know that for sure. I only played with Xandros briefly quite some time ago.

I tried it both ways, with and without SCSI-emulation and no luck. I had downloaded and installed libdvdread3 and libdvdnav and libdvdcss for Xandros and still could not get them to work. Between this and the problem getting the SmartLink modem working in Puppy, it's enough to make me wish I had stuck with my six-year old laptop. Silly me for wanting more capability.

If my dialup wasn't so slow (pages seem to render even more slowly in Xandros than in other distributions), perhaps I could have found an answer in my searches by now or at least have reached this point sooner._________________Walt

Okay. Here's where things now stand. I popped a couple of cheapo DVDs of old movies produced by second-tier distributors (i.e., not the studios themselves)., and they seem to work just fine in Gxine.

When I try a DVD put out by a Hollywood studio (for instance, "The Big Chill"), the drive scans the DVD for a few seconds, Gxine tries to open and play it, then the drive stops scanning and Gxine exits. In one instance, the Warning message played before the application exited, otherwise nothing. In another case, I got the following error message:

Do you have any older versions of Puppy that you can try by booting it just from cd? I am running murga's opera puppy 1.0.1. Dont think anything has changed since then, but might be worth a try. Until I got ogle player to work on present installation, if I really wanted to watch a movie on computer, I tended to boot Puppy 0.9.3 since it had ogle built in and ogle plays much smoother on my old hardware. But no problem getting either gxine or ogleto play a commercial movie dvd. And their is a gpl player called VLC that I have installed on XP. It can be installed in linux also. Works much better than windows media player though anything played on windows on my old computer is kinda slow and notchy, just cause windows itself is bloatware.

Well, I solved this problem (apparently) in Xandros by running a Debian utility called regionset. Turns out the region had not been set on my DVD drive. (I'm now watching one of my Region 1 DVDs, "12 Angry Men.") Does anyone know if 1) having run regionset in Xandros will also set the drive for Puppy? 2) if not, is there a way to set the region of the DVD in Puppy? Thanks._________________Walt

Hmm, just boot puppy and try it. I never heard of the utility, but would guess maybe it sets something in firmware on dvd player so should carry over to Puppy.

Who knows, I have a Chinese dvd of "The African Queen" (Bogart/Hepburn) that wont play on my stand alone dvd player, but plays fine on Puppy or Windows. Supposedly legit copy. Dont know if its set for different region or what.

I'll give it a try to see whether the setting carries over into Puppy. The drive turns out to be an RPC-2 DVD drive (post-2000), which means the drive has to be set to a specific region and can only be set five times by the user (and another five by the vendor) without a firmware upgrade. It's apparently independent of OS.

There's a tar.gz file available at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=31346&package_id=87121 and it's only about 10K in size (6K download). Plus, it's platform independent. It looks like maybe only the one version was ever released, but it worked fine for me. I'll let you know whether DVDs now work in Puppy once I've taken the dog back out for a walk. I'm having to swap between it and Xandros until I get a modem working in Puppy._________________Walt

Most domestic DVD players are region specific.
This is especially apparent over in England, mainly so we have to buy the overpriced DVD's here rather than the cheaper way, from America over the internet.

However, do an internet search for DVD Hacks. Just about every home system has a hack to set it to any region ( as many times as you like too ). They are all basically the same chassis and built usually in the far east, they are then configured to comply to the required market/country.
As far as I know the PC DVD drives can be hacked, coded, modified in the same way.

There was talk about the music business doing a similar thing with CDs. Some coding or encryption so they couldn't be played on a PC ( and subsequently copied ).............yet they keep promoting enhanced CDs with videos on them - very PC specific. You really have to admire the knee-jerk reactions of these people.

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